Archive for the ‘music’ Category
Who’s There?
The incoming students at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts are being asked to visit and write about the “Haunted” exhibition at the Guggenheim before it closes next week. Although I’ve already written about the Casebere photograph in that show, I visited the show again yesterday in order to follow my students’ exercise. They are [...]
In: abstraction, contemporary, music, photography · Tagged with: Annette Messager, Guggenheim Museum, Robert Rauschenberg, spirals
Hail and Farewell
Jazz photographer Herman Leonard died last weekend. His iconic photographs, including the one of Frank Sinatra at right, are said to have “caught jazz itself” and represented the “whole spirit” of his musician subjects. I get impatient with commentary like that, though Leonard’s work had an undeniable signature and impact. Instead, I like the quote [...]
In: contemporary, music, photography · Tagged with: Frank Sinatra, Herman Leonard, jazz
Fifty Years Ago
In 1960 photographer William Claxton accompanied German musicologist Joachim Berendt on a tour of the jazz hotspots of America. The result was their collaboration on Jazzlife, an illustrated catalogue of known and unknown jazz musicians in their own homes and clubs and streets, playing and picnicking. Many of the images, like this one, convey the [...]
In: contemporary, music, photography · Tagged with: JazzLife, New Orleans, William Claxton
Naked on the Grass
A museum exhibit of album covers would be pretty cool. But until that happens we have the Brooklyn Museum’s current exhibition on rock and roll photography, on display through January 31. It’s a fairly new idea as it is, and aims to reconsider this work as “art.” However, the use of these photographs to sell [...]
In: contemporary, landscape, music, photography · Tagged with: Andy Earl, BowWowWow, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Edouard Manet
Three Mouseketeers
Musicians Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse have collaborated with filmmaker David Lynch on an creative package called “Dark Night of the Soul.” I call it a package because it combines music with a book of Lynch’s photographs, but there is no album in the usual sense. The package ships with a blank CD on which you [...]
In: contemporary, music, photography, surrealism · Tagged with: Danger Mouse, David Lynch, Sparklehorse